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In one of the more intentionally and unintentionally confusing films to come out of the directorial career of auteur Arturo Ripstein, El Otro is something else, so to speak. The film is set in the late 1940s or early '50s and told as one partially surreal story within another, and clues to unraveling the gist of the events do not come until the end. It starts when a father gets a letter from his son Armando (Rafael Sanchez-Navarro) saying that he does not want to see his family anymore. Upset, the father sends a friend, Tavares (Ignacio Lopez Tarso) to go to Armando's hacienda and check him out. On the train to the hacienda, Tavares watches an argument between a young woman and a man named Luis, and then the woman rushes into his compartment, they talk, he falls asleep, and she disappears. Once Tavares reaches the hacienda, he finds a journal written by Armando's friend Luis that describes the last several weeks. It turns out Luis did not write the journal, Armando wrote it as though he were Luis. As the events in the journal begin to unfold in flashbacks, Tavares and the audience both try to piece things together.